This invention relates to apparatus and methods for implementing a business process map editor for business analysts.
Modern business processes are often quite complex, which can make change difficult. Nevertheless, to maintain profitability and competiveness in today's marketplace, businesses need to be able to change quickly to take advantage of market opportunities, innovations, expansions, acquisitions, and partnerships with other businesses. To achieve such change, businesses need to have a comprehensive understanding of their internal business structures, including their internal business processes, rules, data, and transformations. This need for understanding is driving the growth of technologies such as business process modeling (BPM).
Business process modeling (BPM) generally refers to the activity of representing the processes of a business so that the processes can be analyzed and improved. BPM is typically performed by business analysts and managers who are seeking to improve process efficiency and quality. The process improvements identified by BPM may or may not require the involvement of information technology (IT), although this is often the impetus for modeling a business process.
To perform BPM within an organization, various tools have been developed. For example, the Websphere Business Modeler map editor provides a tool for business analysts to define transforms that map input data into output data. The Websphere Business Modeler map editor version 6.2 and older provides a simple map editor with very few functions. These functions are typically inadequate and limit business users from creating more complex mappings.
In view of the foregoing, what is needed is a BPM map editor that provides a richer set of functions for mapping input data into output data. Ideally, such a map editor would be able to leverage the functionality already present in IT-based mapping tools which allow more complex mappings to be defined. This would also minimize the duplication of effort associated with developing business-analyst-based tools and IT-based tools separately.